C&T Publications Eye On Fine Art Photography - October 2014 | Page 56

The Great Hinckley Fire of 1894
by Amanda Stadther, photos © Amanda Stadther

This past Labor Day Weekend as the rest of Minnesota
headed to the cabin or grilled in the backyard I took a
somewhat morbid bike ride into the past to a small lake
north of Hinckley - Skunk Lake.

On September 1st, 1894, the town of Hinckley, Minnesota
was one of four towns in Northern Minnesota obliterated by a
firestorm taking the lives of more than 400 people.
Back then Hinckley was a lumber town of 1400 people,
where business was booming around a seemingly endless
supply of pine trees. The trees were chopped, stripped of
branches and taken to Hinckley to be milled. That logging
practice of leaving small branches on the ground to dry out
year after year was just one of several factors that came
together that day that contributed to a devastating Perfect
Storm erupting over the town.
Another was the weather. The summer of 1894 was
extremely hot and dry and by September 1st, no rain had
fallen in the region for three months. Small fires had erupted
and were slowly simmering and smoldering in the
undergrowth. Hinckley residents has become used to smoke
drifting across the town from "nuisance" fires and went about
their day as usual.
What remains of the Hinckley railroad looking north.

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